There is usually not much happening at Cat's Art MusikCircus during Yankee hours ... but that needed to change last night.
I sent out very few messages about playing and somehow Voodoo Shilton heard about it. He came and he sent a very cool message offline to me about the jams and it's most appreciated as the man knows the subject of music upside-down and backwards.
Sister Julie came over with LuLu and Chris was levitating in and out of there too. I couldn't really tell very well who was there as I was pushing buttons and chanting arcane spells at the equipment.
If they're really good, maybe I will take them to see the lemurs sometime!
(Ed: lemurs?)
Long story!
Voodoo, I did see that about clippage and you know the infuriation of changing a knob over here only to need to change more knobs in twelve other places. Perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit but you know how it goes. I'm thinking it might be time for the GAR ... Global Atomic Reset. That would give coolness in forcing reset of volume levels everywhere and that would be annoying but could yield much goodness. I would lose existing loops but really I need to re-record them anyway as nothing else will really, really get the levels rights.
As to key changes, most of the time I really don't even think about it so much. I'll find some notes the chords like and things will evolve from there. But lately I've been looking for getting more elaborate and to how to pull off key changes with a looper. I mentioned previously that a huge problem is there's no way to modulate. You can be in A and then you can be in B but there's no good way to be anywhere in-between. This is not even in any faint way an excuse; it's the way loopers work.
(Carry the above through a little bit. How about a looper that permits ten phrases so then you can be switching back and forth between bits in tremendous complexity. Think long on a device as sophisticated as this because you could very well find yourself spending more time playing the device than playing your instrument. I don't mean in terms of hardware hassles but rather that you could easily find yourself making a whole lot of loops just because you can.)
It would turn into a lengthy bit to go into detail on the structure of a song using an RC-50. The main things needed to picture it are that there are the three independent musical phrases, all of which are probably but not necessarily at the same tempo. At present, they will probably also have the same associated drum pattern. You will be tempted by that third phrase as it's not such a deal to come up with two phrases you can use and switching back and forth between them is entertaining ... but what will you do with that third one and how will you handle juggling now that you have three balls in the air. Know all the while that the audience doesn't give any kind of a tinker's damn about how you do this. Just don't suck. And, of course, why should anyone need a PhD in Electrical Engineering to understand what you do.
Key changing is where there's a huge potential for drowning in artsy-fartsy as what reason do you have to change a key. The key change adds musical interest but it just becomes an exercise if there's too much interesting and not enough feeling. Maybe you could jazz up a love song by playing in a sweetness and light key and then shifting to the key for being attacked by flying monkeys when the relationship breaks up. (There's a previous article on keys and emotions or feelings associated with each one. I don't see much point in memorizing it as the important thing, in my view, is to fully consider that the different keys really do have significantly different 'personalities.' If you know why they have different personalities then you are probably just about ready to pick up your degree in music.)
Something that's of huge interest to me but is, I think, beyond current looper technology is that there's no elegant way to deconstruct a loop. That is, you can't take parts out of it after you have recorded them. There is one level of Undo on an RC-50 and that has musical coolness and application but hitting the Undo button again will put that loop bit back into it. What I would like to do is to keep on peeling off levels. I imagine Voodoo has the same interest as he often goes at least five or six or more levels deep in adding instruments to his loops. If it were possible to peel those levels off then one can make a graceful exit from a song rather than bringing it up to a full boil in a loop and only to find the only way out of it is to run it into a wall.
On one thing I get more and more clear: I only want to play for friends and Cat's Art MusikCircus is the best place to do it. I will likely go to Avination and do something similar over there tonight as it's similar. Zaphod and Ichi are in Germany so I would do that more toward Euro time but we'll see what's best as the day goes along. They're very good people and surprising them with some jams would be quite nice.
I sent out very few messages about playing and somehow Voodoo Shilton heard about it. He came and he sent a very cool message offline to me about the jams and it's most appreciated as the man knows the subject of music upside-down and backwards.
Sister Julie came over with LuLu and Chris was levitating in and out of there too. I couldn't really tell very well who was there as I was pushing buttons and chanting arcane spells at the equipment.
If they're really good, maybe I will take them to see the lemurs sometime!
(Ed: lemurs?)
Long story!
Voodoo, I did see that about clippage and you know the infuriation of changing a knob over here only to need to change more knobs in twelve other places. Perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit but you know how it goes. I'm thinking it might be time for the GAR ... Global Atomic Reset. That would give coolness in forcing reset of volume levels everywhere and that would be annoying but could yield much goodness. I would lose existing loops but really I need to re-record them anyway as nothing else will really, really get the levels rights.
As to key changes, most of the time I really don't even think about it so much. I'll find some notes the chords like and things will evolve from there. But lately I've been looking for getting more elaborate and to how to pull off key changes with a looper. I mentioned previously that a huge problem is there's no way to modulate. You can be in A and then you can be in B but there's no good way to be anywhere in-between. This is not even in any faint way an excuse; it's the way loopers work.
(Carry the above through a little bit. How about a looper that permits ten phrases so then you can be switching back and forth between bits in tremendous complexity. Think long on a device as sophisticated as this because you could very well find yourself spending more time playing the device than playing your instrument. I don't mean in terms of hardware hassles but rather that you could easily find yourself making a whole lot of loops just because you can.)
It would turn into a lengthy bit to go into detail on the structure of a song using an RC-50. The main things needed to picture it are that there are the three independent musical phrases, all of which are probably but not necessarily at the same tempo. At present, they will probably also have the same associated drum pattern. You will be tempted by that third phrase as it's not such a deal to come up with two phrases you can use and switching back and forth between them is entertaining ... but what will you do with that third one and how will you handle juggling now that you have three balls in the air. Know all the while that the audience doesn't give any kind of a tinker's damn about how you do this. Just don't suck. And, of course, why should anyone need a PhD in Electrical Engineering to understand what you do.
Key changing is where there's a huge potential for drowning in artsy-fartsy as what reason do you have to change a key. The key change adds musical interest but it just becomes an exercise if there's too much interesting and not enough feeling. Maybe you could jazz up a love song by playing in a sweetness and light key and then shifting to the key for being attacked by flying monkeys when the relationship breaks up. (There's a previous article on keys and emotions or feelings associated with each one. I don't see much point in memorizing it as the important thing, in my view, is to fully consider that the different keys really do have significantly different 'personalities.' If you know why they have different personalities then you are probably just about ready to pick up your degree in music.)
Something that's of huge interest to me but is, I think, beyond current looper technology is that there's no elegant way to deconstruct a loop. That is, you can't take parts out of it after you have recorded them. There is one level of Undo on an RC-50 and that has musical coolness and application but hitting the Undo button again will put that loop bit back into it. What I would like to do is to keep on peeling off levels. I imagine Voodoo has the same interest as he often goes at least five or six or more levels deep in adding instruments to his loops. If it were possible to peel those levels off then one can make a graceful exit from a song rather than bringing it up to a full boil in a loop and only to find the only way out of it is to run it into a wall.
On one thing I get more and more clear: I only want to play for friends and Cat's Art MusikCircus is the best place to do it. I will likely go to Avination and do something similar over there tonight as it's similar. Zaphod and Ichi are in Germany so I would do that more toward Euro time but we'll see what's best as the day goes along. They're very good people and surprising them with some jams would be quite nice.
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